The Romance of Certain Old Bones

by Holly Messinger

  “Hope!” Jacob shouted, and got no answer, which was not unusual, though increasingly irritating. The professor had seemed sensible enough during the trek across the prairie but since they’d descended into the rocky terrain near Hell Creek, he had become distracted, with a disturbing tendency to wander.

  Jacob started up the draw, his boots sliding on the fine grit of the shale. The passage was just wide enough for a horse to pass, its walls roughened by aeons of wind and water. As he reached the top of the chute, a stiff gale whipped up in his face and tried to take his hat off, buffeting against his clothes as if it meant to push him back down the chute. He caught onto the walls again, fingertips snagging and tearing over small edges sharp as teeth.

  “Damn it!” He dug in his grip harder, righted himself, and staggered up the last rise into a bowl-like plateau that stretched out perhaps a quarter-mile, forming a ballroom of prairie grass that was partly shielded by a steep bluff. The professor stood several yards away, inspecting the bluff wall.

  “Mr. Tracy!” he called, beckoning. He sounded more enthused than Jacob had ever heard him. “Mr. Tracy, do come and give me your opinion of this.”

  Jacob had in mind to give him an opinion or two, but the words died in his throat as he saw what had captured Hope’s attention.

  There was a backbone protruding from the stone wall. An impossibly long backbone, maybe ten or twelve feet worth on view, and judging by the lack of taper… Jacob’s eye automatically measured it out, estimated the length of tail, should such a backbone terminate the way a lizard’s did. He knew instinctively he was looking a lizard. Or a gator, maybe. A gator he never wanted to meet, even in nightmares. And at the near end where they stood, a ridge of rusty-looking bone, like the arc over an eye, peering out of the rock. Watching them, as if to gauge their tastiness—and how quickly it could snap its head around from within the confines of its stone prison.

  “I think we will make camp here, Mr. Tracy,” Professor Hope said.

  5

  The sun was high in the blazing white sky. The dig site rang with the impact of hammers striking drill bits, pick-axes crunching into the shale bluff, and the dry, excited voice of Professor Hope as he examined yet another jumble of bone and sediment.

  Hope called the long serpentine creature in the rock Mosasaurus proriger which, if Jacob remembered his Latin correctly, meant ”really big reptile that ate anything else in the water.” According to Hope, the whole prairie had once been under water. He’d pointed out the layers of silt deposits in the rock and painted a picture of a vast inland sea, from the Rockies to the Appalachians, that teemed with strange and terrible creatures: giant turtles, crocodiles with flippers, swollen-bellied sea monsters with oars for limbs, and flying dragons with wings the length of a box-car.

  The bones they took out of the bluff seemed to corroborate his stories. The Yalies may have been greenhorns but they had the strength and enthusiasm of young men on a lark. From sunup to sundown, all seven of them whaled away at the bluff wall with picks and shovels, pausing now and then to call the professor’s attention to something they found. Every new hour brought fresh exclamations of surprise and delight over a gleaming shell, a shining tooth, or a pile of stones inside an old crushed rib cage.

  Jacob didn’t mind the work and for the most part he didn’t mind the dead things. Most of the fossils were innocuous—fish, shells, small birds—or they were so incomplete as to be no more menacing than the bones of a chicken dinner. But Jacob avoided the mosasaur skeleton as much as possible. Young Ryan was performing that extraction himself, after much pleading and enduring Hope’s lectures about how valuable and fragile those big bones were. Ryan was practically removing the thing with a toothpick, compared to the great chunks of concrete the others dug out of the bluff.

  Jacob pitied the young man, having once felt that puppylike desperation to please, that utter belief in a higher power and the priests who hoarded its secrets. And he felt contempt for Ryan, for the same reason.

  He lifted his pick again as a shadow fell across the bluff, and he looked around to see Bosley approaching. His own pick was on his shoulder and a canteen in his hand. But it was the look on his face that checked Jacob’s swing.

  Bosley held out the canteen. “We got company.”

  “Where?”

  “Over my right shoulder. Twin towers, left of the shorter. Heads poppin up like gophers.”

  Jacob lifted the canteen and drank, looking at the same time. He saw movement out there perhaps a mile away. “Sioux?”

  “Doubt it. They’re wearin hats.”

  “Stanley back yet?”

  “Where you think I got the water?”

  Stanley was the only member of the party, other than the cook, who didn’t spend his time digging. He spent every day leading a mule team twenty miles round-trip to fetch water from Glendive Creek, since the few tiny streams near their camp were so full of silt they were undrinkable. And it was just as well Stanley had that chore to keep him occupied, because he flatly refused to go near any of the bones, either while they were in the wall or after they had been removed.

  They found Stanley with the cook, helping him pour off water from one of the barrels into the coffee-kettle. Jacob asked him whether he’d seen signs of company while on his water errands and the boy nodded at once.

  “More bone hunters. Bout a mile up the bowl. Another group of white men, like these.” Stanley pursed his lips toward the Yalies. “They got Sioux scouts with them.”

  “How do you know?” Jacob asked, at the same time Bosley said, “How many?”

  “Three,” Stanley replied. “Leather shoes on their horses.”

  “How do you know they’re bone hunters?” Jacob asked.

  “Cuz they’re digging,” Stanley said, with a glance that said, Are you stupid? ”Their Big Bone Chief is older than yours. Got a big red beard.”

  Hope, with a teacher’s instinct for scenting mischief, had joined them in time to hear this last sentence. “Red beard? Where did you see—”

  “There.” Stanley pointed impatiently toward the twin towers. “He’s found a Thunder Bird.”

  “Damnation!” Hope exclaimed, which rather surprised Jacob—he had not heard the man swear before. “I knew that Pond was playing me for a fool. Ryan! Matheson! All of you—” He beckoned to the students, gathered them around to hear the news.

  From what Jacob could glean, the other Big Bone Chief was the Professor March that Hope had so worried about jumping his claim. Some prospector named Pond had discovered some bones out here the year before and had offered them to Hope, but March had gotten wind of the find and had bought the fossils out from under Hope’s nose. Now here was Hope’s rival, less than a mile up-river, once again with more diggers, more scouts, more funding.

  Jacob privately thought there were more than enough bones to go around, but he grasped that there was a history, and hence a lack of rationality, about this rivalry. “You think they’ll make trouble?”

  “Mr. Tracy, you don’t understand,” Ryan said, while Hope flared white nostrils, too upset to speak. “March has sabotaged our digs before. He’s paid men to smash fossils rather than let us have them. He’s falsified dates on his publications. He—”

  “He is entirely without honor or scruples,” Hope snapped. “I would not put murder past him.”

  The Yalies looked shocked, though Jacob was skeptical. Bosley’s face was expressionless, Stanley’s worried.

  “Well, all right, let’s not get too excited,” Jacob said. “This butte’s up high and there’s only the one access trail. Nobody’ll sneak up on us if we don’t let ’em. Any of you men heeled?”

  They all looked at him blankly.

  “Guns,” he said impatiently. “Any of you armed?”

  One of the Yalies had brought a squirrel gun. Another had his father’s hunting rifle. Hope lifted his chin a notch. “I am a Quaker, sir,” was all he said.

  And a rich one at that, Jacob thought. Only a wealthy
pacifist could afford not to hunt his own food. Bosley had a pair of top-break Smith & Wessons—he strapped them on before he brushed his teeth every morning—and Jacob had his old army Colt. Stanley put a hand inside his shirt and nodded once; Jacob didn’t know what that meant but he believed the boy could take care of himself.

  “Fine,” Jacob said. “It won’t hurt us to set watches through the night. Ryan, you and Walsh can take the first watch after supper, Bosley and I—”

  “Is that necessary?” Ryan protested.

  “No, it isn’t,” Hope said. “Mr. Tracy, I appreciate your zeal, but if my students are going to be awake through the night they will be digging. You and your man there were hired to guard us, you may divide up the watch between yourselves, if you feel it necessary. Put your pet trail-guide to work as well, he never does anything.”

  Jacob decided then and there he didn’t like the professor much. He looked at Bosley but the latter scratched his nose and shrugged, as if to say What can you expect?

  Hope ordered the students back to work. Stanley tugged at Bosley’s sleeve and said something in a low urgent voice. The two of them began to walk away toward the water-mules and after a minute of fuming indecision, Jacob followed.

  “—he knows,” Stanley said, jerking his head toward Jacob as he got near. “You hear ’em, don’t you?”

  “Hear what?” Jacob said, taken aback.

  “The voices. All this digging is waking them up. They shouldn’t be messing in maxpé matters.”

  Jacob had never heard the word before, but he knew instantly what Stanley was talking about. He stared at the boy, while a clammy, familiar hand of dread settled on the nape of his neck.

  “Maxpé means mysteries,” Bosley translated. He said it magh-pay, with a sound in the middle like gargling. “Magic, religion.”

  Devil’s work, Jacob heard his father’s voice mutter, and felt his guts clench, wondering when he had slipped up, that the boy might’ve seen. He’d gotten pretty good, over the years, at controlling his reactions when he came upon anything supernatural, but that thing in the bluff was no ordinary ghost, and Stanley didn’t like it, either—

  He ground down his worry, heel-stomping old memories into their shallow grave. “They’re just old bones, son,” he said, more sharply than he meant to.

  It was Stanley’s turn to look nonplussed. Then he caught on and his expression turned to scorn. “Sure. And it’s just bread and wine to you.”

  Jacob raised an eyebrow. Bosley snorted and smoothed away a smirk with one hand. “Fair hit,” he murmured.

  It was, though Bosley didn’t know the half of it. And Jacob couldn’t afford to let him know—but neither could he afford to discount Stanley’s story. They had, after all, hired the boy because he knew what was what out here, and Jacob had seen too much to ignore a warning of evil.

  With a sense of wading into dangerous waters, Jacob said, “So what’s the problem, son? What do you think is gonna happen?”

  “The Professor’s found a bulukse’e— a water monster,” Stanley explained. “The other Bone Chief is digging up a Thunder Bird. They’re enemies. If they get free they’ll make war. And we’ll get caught in the middle.”

  “You sayin they’ll come back to life?” Bosley said.

  Stanley hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know what will happen. My grandfather said these bones were maxpé—not to be disturbed. He brought me up here, when I was nine.” The boy touched his breastbone in a gesture Jacob recognized—he was patting the medicine bag under his shirt. “He said no one should touch these bones except a maxpé batsé—a medicine man. And only if they gave him permission.”

  “Like in a vision,” Bosley said to Jacob.

  Stanley nodded and swept a hand to encompass the bluff face. “These layers of stone are layers of time. All these times are still here, but stuck. We shouldn’t wake them.”

  Jacob found he agreed with that sentiment more than not. But he also had the present to worry about, and he couldn’t just walk away from a season’s pay. “Be that as it may, I don’t think it’s gonna persuade the professor to quit—”

  There was a sudden, short scream over by the bluff. And then Hope’s raised voice and Ryan shouting back at him, his voice ragged with pain and rage. The other students dropped their tools and ran toward the mosasaur site, and by the time Jacob got there he had to elbow his way through them to see what the hell Ryan had done to himself.

  6

  He’d slipped with the chisel, was what, and cut off the little finger of his left hand. Jacob still couldn’t figure out how he’d done it—Ryan said he’d been trying to chip away a last bit of stone holding a tooth in place and had been distracted when Hope walked up behind him. None of the Yalies had the slightest experience with doctoring wounds—one of them fainted at the sight of the stump—so Bosley made Ryan lie on his back for a while with a rag pressed to the wound, until the bleeding slowed to an ooze. Then he boiled some bandages, doused them with whiskey, and tied a loose bag around the finger. If it didn’t close up in a few days, he said, he’d stitch it. Ryan nodded, white-faced and apologizing to the professor for delaying the dig.

  “Just thank Providence you didn’t damage the specimen,” Hope said curtly.

  “Can I just say,” Jacob said to Bosley, while pulling off his boots in their tent that night, “thank you for havin more sense than God gave a goose? Cause I hate to think I could’ve been alone out here with these yahoos.”

  Stretched out on his cot, Bosley chuckled, spilling shreds of tobacco from the cigarette he was trying to roll. “Least it’s not the army. We can still walk away from this lot, not get shot for deserters.”

  “Amen to that.” Jacob pulled off his shirt and reached to hang it over the peg at the head of his own cot. From the corner of his eye he saw Bosley glance at his flank, presumably at the long scar that curved over his hipbone.

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked, in between licking the seam of his rolling paper.

  “Antietam,” Jacob said. “Bayonet.”

  “You musta been in diapers at the time.”

  “I was twenty.”

  “Like I said.” Bosley tossed over the tobacco pouch.

  Jacob caught it. “How long were you in?”

  “Five years in the Tenth.” Bosley paused to light his cigarette. “Though I worked for the Union Army before that, through the War.” He drew a deep satisfied lungful of smoke and exhaled through his nostrils.

  “Had enough of that, huh?”

  Bosley snorted. “People shootin at you for being a nigger in uniform—the townfolk you was sent to protect, takin potshots at you from behind the woodshed. Half of us barefoot, marchin through snow on less food than you’d put out for a stray cat, for a lousy thirteen dollars a month. Hell yeah I’d had enough.” He kicked back on his cot, crossed his ankles. “You give any credit to that water-monster story Stanley told us?”

  Jacob managed not to flinch. “Do you?”

  “I don’t. But you’re a papist. You supposed to believe in that stuff.” He jerked his chin at Jacob’s crucifix. “What were you, a priest?”

  “You’re sure in a talkative mood tonight,” Jacob said.

  Bosley’s expression turned bland. “It’s no nevermind to me. You just looked like a goose walked over your grave when he asked about the voices. I wondered if you knew somethin I didn’t.”

  Careful, Jacob’s brain warned him. Careful. He took a moment to lick the seam of his own cigarette. “I believe it enough not to mess with it. But we got enough to worry about with this other party of bone sharps. Specially if Hope’s right about them being the murderin kind.”

  Bosley grunted. “Well. I don’t believe in maxpé matters, but I seen enough people kill each other in the name of their gods. You know the Crow and the Sioux used to be the same tribe? Way back before the white men got here, some Jesuit missionary told me. Said they had the same language tree or somethin like that. Same gods, same stories bout the world c
omin to be, and how it’s gonna end. But somewhere along the way they had a disagreement over huntin-grounds and became enemies. Spent the last age tryin to kill each other.”

  “Like Jacob and Esau.”

  “If you say so. I was thinkin of our Professor and this March fella he’s so bent over. Same religion, same huntin-grounds. Can’t nobody hate each other like a pair of brothers.”

  7

  Jacob had terrible dreams that night. Some of it was the old nightmare, of being dragged down by his fallen company-mates in that sunken road. But this time the mud and bodies were less viscous and more free-floating: the trench was deepening, filling with water. It was raining, and he felt movement against his hand and leg as something long and sinuous slid past him in the dark—

  He woke with a scream trapped inside his clenched and aching jaw, going mmph! mmph! in his own ears, shaking all over like a dog and clutching at the warm human hand that found his in the dark.

  “You all right, Boss,” a voice was saying, calm and firm, another hand kneading his shoulder. “Just settle yourself, Mr. Tracy. You in Montana. Ain’t no cannons here. Nobody shootin. You safe here.”

  “Bosley,” he croaked.

  “Right here, Boss. You want a light?” The friendly hands started to pull away.

  “No! Lord, no.” He didn’t want anyone else to come investigating. He struggled to sit up, and Bosley moved to sit beside him on the rickety cot, his hand on the back of Jacob’s neck, steady as a priest’s—or the hand of God he had sometimes imagined as a boy, strong and strength-giving. “What time is it?”

  “Bout midnight. Came in to wake you for your watch. Sounded like you was takin on the whole Confederate army by yourself.”

  Confederate. Sure. Jacob didn’t know whether to be gratified by the assumption or ashamed of himself for letting it stand. “I’ll take that watch now—”

  “Take it easy. Get your legs back. Don’t need you fallin down some cliff in the dark.”